<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Tales To Be Told, Vol. 2 by leetlebastard</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24410701">Tales To Be Told, Vol. 2</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/leetlebastard/pseuds/leetlebastard'>leetlebastard</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(again?), Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Office Romance, Angst with a Happy Ending, Author is a member of the Martin Blackwood Simp Society and it Shows, Breaking Up &amp; Making Up, Getting Together, Humor, M/M, Martin &amp; Jon - idiots of the century, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, The Mechanisms Were The Archivist's College Band, in which the institute is just a Fancy Ghost Library &amp; Research Center, it's complicated - Freeform, it's the s1 found family dynamic we deserve, kind of?</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 05:27:30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,610</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24410701</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/leetlebastard/pseuds/leetlebastard</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Martin is twenty years old when he meets Jonny d'Ville in the back of a dim bar, music still lingering in the air, the future all cold and polluted. Over drinks and the course of two years, the man brings him galaxies and constellations and orbit, though he never sees him away from the flashing lights and the dark makeup and the hour he gets once the show is over.<br/>He meets Jonathan Sims years later while hiding incompetence behind cups of Earl Grey and soft sweaters in a job he shouldn't have. The man hates him, plain and simple. This isn't actually as big a deterrent as Martin would have thought.<br/>Both times, he falls deeply, irrevocably in love. Both times, he's setting himself up to break his own damn heart, because both times, they are two different people.<br/>(They are very much <span class="u">not</span> two different people.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Martin Blackwood &amp; Sasha James &amp; Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>36</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>249</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Tales To Be Told, Vol. 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hello!<br/>God it's been ages since I've had to write ao3 notes at the beginning of fanfiction so forgive me if this is awful!<br/>I wrote this in a flurry of God I Love Martin Blackwood energy after making an honestly frightening amount of Jonny D'Ville cosplay tiktoks, but I'm very excited about it!<br/>I was very much inspired by veritashopian's <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23371096/chapters/55997800">Poster Boy</a> so if you, like me, are enamored with the "the mechs were Jon's college band" au go check that out!<br/>Title from the Mechanisms album by the same name, and chapter titles from Sufjan Stevens' John My Beloved because I am nothing if not predictable.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Martin K. Blackwood was a creature of habit. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He liked his morning tea black and his afternoon tea green and he always took it with a spoon of honey, two if he was having a particularly shoddy day. He had a preferred sweater for each day of the week. He had a habit of twisting the strawberry blonde hair that curled around his right ear around his finger when he was focusing. On the occasional chance he felt too angry with the big bad world to let it bristle up inside of him and bleed out slowly like the tide, he got drunk on hard lemonades, the gross American kind he’d gotten into in secondary school, and wrote letters to his mother which he burned at the stove upon completion. He even had a habit of keeping the ashes. Every time, he kept the ashes. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then (most extraordinarily, most destructively) there was his habit of Jo(h)ns. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Martin’s first love had washed up to him on the low tide. Back when his father’s absence had still throbbed painfully in his mother’s house like a bone bruise, Martin had taken every chance to escape that came to him. The ocean had given him just that: a place to stare when he didn’t want to be stared at back, a place to cry when he didn’t want to be too loud, a place to just </span>
  <em>
    <span>breathe</span>
  </em>
  <span> without taking up too much space. And it was there he met John Cline. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Martin had been fifteen, skipping stones out with a well earned accuracy he’d cultivated proudly over the past few weeks. John had been swimming, a rock had grazed by his shoulder, and the next thing Martin knew he’d fallen in love with the first boy to ever pay him a bit of attention. They’d walked the beach together nearly every day that summer, holding hands when absolutely no one was around to see it, and they never, ever went into town. Martin had cried into his pillow many nights that summer, hating John’s “strict” parents and his own insecurity and the fact that he had no one to talk to about it. That was the first time Martin had realized how achingly lonely he was, despite the boy who held his hand and sometimes made Martin think he knew what it felt like to be loved. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then the summer had ended, and John had left, and Martin was still lonely, only now he truly was alone. He </span>
  <span>had</span>
  <span> learned how to love, though. It was the sort of thing he’d always coveted, love, and now, the floodgates had opened and Martin loved <em>everything</em>. He let all the love build him a little taller, a little wiser, until he was consumed with it, until he thought some nights it was a wretched thing, to have so much love for a world that gave little back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d thought, once or twice, that that summer had heralded not just a broken heart, but a curse as well. Because, try as he might, he couldn’t escape the name. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>At sixteen, it was Elton John, his wall plastered with posters from an era he could just barely taste, music so bright and happy it could bring a smile to Martin’s face when he was ignoring his mother, and sometimes so aching and angry it came to him kicking and screaming. He’d climbed up to the roof nearly every night that year, consumed with the thrill of it, </span>
  <em>
    <span>Honky Cat</span>
  </em>
  <span> trilling away in his cheap MP3 player as he smiled into the night and thought about escape, freedom, the life he was going to carve into the world with his bare hands, the vibrancy with which he was going to live, and the love which he was going to recklessly, achingly foster. As he looked up into that endless night, sixteen and too big for his mother’s house and too reckless for his own mild sensibilities, he let the </span>
  <em>
    <span>Rocketman</span>
  </em>
  <span> tell him how love was a weapon, was an anchor, was so much more than a half-forgotten blonde boy on a beach and a mother with a rattling cough who wouldn’t look him in the eye. He couldn’t say if he’d loved the music or the vast expanse of stars overhead more back then. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>At seventeen, his Biology lab partner with the curtain of black bangs and blue eyes introduced himself as Jay, and when he’d explained to Martin (pressed up against the back of the school where a field and a thatch of trees bracketed them from the whole world) that it was short for Johnathan, it had made sense. Martin wasn’t sure who had broken whose heart, but they had kept in touch through the following years until time caught up with them and pressed the distance and left Martin alone as always. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>At eighteen, his mother got sick. Not much time for boys, then, because Martin loved his mother, and he despised himself for that, and he’d barely graduated secondary school before his first job shifting crates at the less respectable part of the harbor became so corrupt he’d had to take night shifts and 4:00 AM shifts and last minute call-ins just to make enough to afford his mother’s pills. When her doctor mentioned the first surgery, and the clinic in London that specialized in the thing slowly killing her, Martin moved the two of them there without so much as a shred of doubt and took up new, more dangerous (and less legal) jobs and when he looked up out of his window at night, he couldn’t see the stars through the bleary lights and smog of the London skyline. He consoled himself (still lonely, still alone, his mother so loud and so quiet exactly when he needed neither, still scared and still loving her and still scared of himself for his capacity to love her) that he was carving a life into the world just like he’d promised and even though it wasn’t the freedom he’d thought was so close he could taste it, sat up on his childhood roof, it was some semblance of living, and when he closed his eyes he could still imagine constellations, dancing stories patched up against the black backs of his eyelids. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The first time Martin met Jonny d’Ville, he was sitting at the back of a bar hoping that if he glared hard enough into his drink (hard lemonade because, however gross, it was habitual) he might just disappear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d been late to a night out with an old friend from secondary school to see a concert. Some experimental college band he’d never heard of, but if the oscillating colored lights in the bar were anything to go by, some </span>
  <em>
    <span>exciting</span>
  </em>
  <span> experimental college band he’d never heard of. This would have been a lovely way to see an old friend, Martin was sure, had he not been held up at work under the guise of his boss making it very, very clear that this would likely be his last shift unless he stepped in to cover the next one. As it was, he’d gotten there as the stage was being swept, out of breath and guilty and frustrated. Melanie hadn’t held it against him, at least. As she left, smiling apologetically at him with a woman Martin had never seen before giggling at her side, Martin thought distantly that he’d like to keep in touch with her. And then Martin was alone again, and this time it really wasn’t anyone’s fault but his own and his shitty boss’. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>So he was moping, drinking his (absolutely disgusting, putrid, seriously nasty) drink with a morose sort of anger, because his life had gotten so low he couldn’t even see a concert with his friend without tripping over his own sorry excuse for-</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was precisely at that moment that a whirlwind of a man rammed into the side of the bar, laughing and uproarious though there was no one around to talk to other than Martin himself. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Um. Did you need something?” Martin asked when the man (he was wearing a vaguely… pirate like outfit, with a vest over a billowing white shirt and a pair of multicolored steampunk goggles strapped to his head and he was beautiful to look at in a way that hurt Martin’s eyes) didn’t stop laughing in his general direction. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Is this bar taken?” He laughed again, and then he shook his head. “Of course it is. By me!” Martin was about to write him off as just another college student trying to find some fulfillment at the back of a nearly empty bar, except… well, if Martin wasn’t mistaken, the laughter seemed to have descended into giggles, which. Okay, it was kind of adorable to see this steampunk with dark jagged eyeliner spiking out around his eyes and high platform boots giggle uncontrollably. And Martin was having a truly shit night, and so what was the harm if a hot guy wanted to take up a little of his time? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Bit presumptuous, I think,” Martin said, biting down a smile, “Taking this whole bar for yourself. I’m here too!” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” the man said, looking at him with a sharp intensity and an appraising grin, “Yes, you are!” He sounded surprised. “Normally it’s just me after the shows. Georgie goes home to take care of the cat, the cat! And everyone else wants to find a new place to drink, but my feet hurt and really, I’ve been doing all the work up there, can’t they just humor me?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Martin hid a giggle behind his hand as the man slurred his words. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t you laugh at me! I am your immortal captain, Jonny d’Ville! I have roamed planets and people and galaxies and, and…” he looked up at Martin and slumped against the bar, looking puzzled. He pointed to the ceiling above him, face squinted up in confusion. “Dark stuff?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Space?” Martin offered with a raised eyebrow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes!” There was that frightening intensity in the man’s eyes again, something Martin would take as sobriety if not for the lazy smile that made his face seem so open and bright. His eyebrows were up high on his forehead and his mouth was parted slightly around the smile as if in awe. Martin was made aware with a pang that he would do anything to keep Jonny (if that even was his real name) looking at him like that for as long as he could. “How did you know that?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Martin snorted, cheeks flushing. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m Martin,” he said in lieu of an answer, and he grinned as he stuck his hand out cheekily. “It’s lovely to meet you, Jonny.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>When the man reached out to take his hand he held it in his own and did not let go for a very long time.</span>
</p><p>They’d talked for what felt like five minutes but was in fact, as Martin realized with a start when the last drink call went out, closer to an hour. They’d gone from space to the concept of confetti to obscure wars along the French border (this one was more Jonny than Martin but even with his shaky grasp on world history, he was pretty sure the man was making most of it up) to, jarringly, Martin’s own mother. And soon, he was telling this man he’d never met before in his life all the things he’d ever wanted to tell someone, all the guilt and the love and the guilty love he felt and how deeply tired he was, despite barely being twenty. And Jonny had listened. At one point, he’d gone as far as to lean his head supportively against Martin’s shoulder, a bold display of trust that had warmed him down to his very bones, and throughout their whole conversation, he hadn’t let go of Martin’s hand. Their hands were sweaty and gross by the time the night ended, but it didn’t much matter. Martin felt very keenly aware that he had just met the man who was going to change his life. </p><p>
  <span>And when he and Jonny parted ways outside the bar –</span>
</p><p>
  <span>(Jonny stopped him with a hand on his bicep as he took a piece of paper and a pen from his satchel. He uncapped the pen with his teeth and Martin thought he might swoon then and there, and then he handed him a note with an address of another bar and a time and the name of the band playing there that night, The Mechanisms), well –</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Martin quite hoped he was going to change Jonny’s life too. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d gone to the pub two weeks later, showed up early even, smiling bright with the euphoria of having quit the job that was treating him so terribly and leaving his shitty boss with a few cutting remarks that one might even call “bitchy”. The bar was filled with flashing colored lights and quite a few smoke machines were churning out fog across the floor and though it was small, it was packed tight with people. Martin found himself again at the back, sitting and watching from the bar. He gazed out at the crowd curiously. Most people there seemed to fit into what his mother might call the “dirty punk scene”. There were plenty a bad dye job to be seen, and some people had really spared no extravagance in their outfits. Martin felt decidedly underdressed in the fun striped button up he’d chosen and with the barest hint of eyeliner on his eyelids, but as soon as the lights dimmed, all the thoughts in his head quieted down to make room for the <em>shock</em>.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The music began to swell as various band members entered the stage to applause and cheers and began to tune their instruments. All of them seemed to have costumes on, similar to the pirate-like steampunk get-up he’d seen Jonny in. And speaking of Jonny…</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When Martin saw him strut (no, actually strut) up on stage, and then stagger towards the mic, his small gasp was drowned out by uproarious applause and Martin felt hopelessly, unchangeably enamored.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How is everybody?” he asked, voice low and lilting in a way that made him seem truly insincere. The audience cheered and the man on stage scoffed. “Oh is that all then? Might as well pack up now.” The audience just screamed louder, and Martin couldn’t tell where the laughter ended and the booing began. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Martin huffed a little laugh at the man, obviously more sober than he had been two weeks ago. In all the getup, he should have looked ridiculous. But the persona, the makeup, the person he became when he stepped on stage… well, who could blame Martin if he fell just a little bit in love right then and there? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>After a bit more heckling, Martin got the sense that the show was truly about to begin. Jonny threw one last little smile out into the audience and for one small shining moment, Martin got the feeling it was directed right at him. Alas, that was the last time that night he was able to string together coherent thoughts that weren’t ‘holy </span>
  <em>
    <span>shit’</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>Like whiskey laced with gasoline, we’ll get you stinking drunk. So shut your face and settle down, you sneering little punks! For space is vast and you are small, it’s black and bitter cold. The book is lying open. There are tales to be told!</span>
  </em>
  <span>” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The band was incredible. Jonny was </span>
  <em>
    <span>incredible</span>
  </em>
  <span>. It was like nothing Martin had ever seen before, and by the end of the night he felt so warm, like he was full of fire, and he was ready to call himself a killer, a renegade, a liar, and a thief just to get another glimpse of the immortal space pirates roaming the galaxies on their starship Aurora. Quite simply put, Martin had never felt so alive as he did in the back of that dingy old pub as he watched Jonny d’Ville spit curses at his adoring audience and tell them all some stories. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>When they finally took their exit, Martin stayed put. He wasn’t sure he could move, not after the spectacle he’d just seen, and more than that… he was waiting. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Enjoy the show?” There it was, that same gravelly voice from the stage that had just captured Martin’s heart. Martin turned to the man and beamed. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That was fantastic!” The man’s sharp smile softened as Martin spoke. “You were wonderful, Jonny.” Martin said it warmly, genuinely, (trying desperately not to seem as flustered as he was), and while he was sure Jonny d’Ville heard these compliments regularly, something in his face lit up, like he was exorbitantly pleased to hear praise from Martin himself. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Thank you for coming. Can’t be having all the fun post show drinks by myself, now can I?” Jonny tipped his glass in Martin’s direction appreciatively. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They drifted into conversation easily. Martin was sure it must have looked strange, someone big and soft and sweet looking like him talking to the angular steampunk cabaret frontman, but somehow they managed. Martin would make a sharp joke and it would surprise a laugh out of Jonny, and then Jonny would rant about the brand of gels the pub used in their lighting system with as much passion as he did anything on stage and Martin would <em>listen</em>. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>At the end of the night, Jonny got quiet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re going back home to your mum tonight?” He said when Martin asked him what was the matter. Martin winced. Apparently, he’d remembered his drunken rambling.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I mean, it is my flat.” He said, feeling lost and somewhat annoyed until–</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Oh, until. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Until Jonny d’Ville reached out from where he was sitting and pulled Martin into a tight hug. <em>What? Really? What?</em> Martin’s brain was firing in about a million directions at once as he shakily returned the embrace.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Take care of yourself, Martin,” Jonny whispered in his ear, before he pulled back, pressed a kiss to Martin’s cheek, and handed him another slip of paper with the date and location of the next Mechanisms show. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Martin hadn’t known how to respond, but he’d smiled the whole walk home. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They met like that every few weeks for the next two years. Martin would watch the show and smile and sing along and feel vibrantly alive, and then Jonny d’Vile would saunter up to him and let a bit of the extravagance fall away and they’d joke and give each other updates about their lives (Jonny’s college career, how overwhelmed he got, how he used performing as a defense and a second skin, and then Martin’s endless job hunt, how he’d always loved the stars, how he’d been waiting for someone like Jonny since he was fifteen years old) and when everyone had left and the bar of the week was nearly closed, Jonny would ask if he was going home to his mother and hold him close when Martin told him he was. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jonny brought the stars back to him one by one. The London sky was always murky, but when Jonny gifted him Orion in the form of a wink as he leapt onstage, when he handed him a newly felled sun in the shape of kiss to his temple, gentle like seabreeze, arms around his shoulders as he stood tall on his tiptoes, Martin felt full to bursting with constellations and star stuff. It was love without obligation - Jonny didn’t even know his last name, and Martin barely knew what he looked like outside of the flashing lights and the dark makeup and the soft three-drinks-in smile. It was so different from the stifling, obligatory love he felt, crammed into the apartment he shared with his mother. He loved Jonny d’Ville because he chose to love him, because Jonny leaned over the mic stand and leered at the crowd and threw his hair back while he sang and gave Martin the freedom to sing along, and waiting for him to get done backstage at the back of an emptying bar was the first time in his adult life when Martin did not feel lonely. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The night The Mechanisms broke up, Martin went home numb and began research on the care homes his mother had been grousing about not being able to live in. He found one he could afford (that was a lie. He’d have to figure something out, figure a lot of </span>
  <em>
    <span>somethings</span>
  </em>
  <span> out, to be able to afford it) and when he’d shown her the pictures, she’d beamed at him. He’d smiled too, and had known that with Jonny gone, lost in a whirlwind of London stage names and stars and “too good to be true”s, he would only ever conceivably be loved for what he could give. And Martin craved love like flowers crave sunlight, wanted to get so close to it he burned – So he would give.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was giving when he spent the next five years pushing himself to the brink and further working day in and day out just to be able to afford ready-made meals at the end of the day. He knew he couldn’t go on living like that. Knew he was needed, at least by his mother, at least for the money.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was giving when he faked his CV. It was giving when he sat, trying hard not to sweat, in the office of a man with sharp eyes and a pinched face, and lied bravely. Elias Bouchard was not happy to see him, that much was obvious, but he had given him the job anyway. Martin took the job knowing he’d have to bend over backwards to fake it, but when he called his mother about it she almost seemed happy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So Martin continued some habits and broke others and all the while, with a heart still full of song and a love burning bright for a man who must have been galaxies away by that point, he thought he’d broken his most destructive pattern. After all, if he was still just a little bit in love with Jonny d’Ville, why would he need another person to fill a space they couldn’t ever fit into?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then Jonathan Sims stole his heart away in an instant. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>On his first day, after meeting Cass from accounting and Ellen from HR and finally, Sasha James, who had smiled wide and pulled a braid back from her face when she introduced herself and seemed by a long shot to be the most competent person in the institute, his new desk neighbor took it upon himself to show Martin around. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh no no no,” Tim said as he shouldered past Sasha who had just introduced him to ‘The Menace, Timothy Stoker’, “Sorry Sash, the cute boy is my territory.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, wearing that? You sure?” Sasha bantered back, nodding to Tim’s just slightly off dress code button down, while Martin blushed and stammered at being called “cute” so flippantly. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re going to the cafe on the corner for lunch if you want to join us,” Sasha said, turning away from Tim and back to Martin with an apologetic smile. “We always have lunch out on Fridays.” And Martin, looking back and forth between the two of them, leaning on each other and smiling at him hopefully, felt something warm unfurl in his chest. He smiled back. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That sounds lovely, Sasha, thank you,” He managed to say in his most confident I Know How To Talk To Other People voice, keeping the blushing to what he hoped was a minimum as he turned to Tim expectantly with an unimpressed stare. “Now, I believe I was promised a tour.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I like him Sasha! We’re keeping him!” Tim announced, to which Martin made a show of rolling his eyes at. He was smiling, though, so his “tough” exterior was dampened. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Tim, as it turned out, offered up friendship like it was as easy as breathing. Conversation just seemed to come easy with someone like Tim Stoker, so it felt like no time at all passed as he showed him around the break room, some other offices, and then, most excitingly, the library. Tim’s eyes lit up as he pointed to a man walking towards them carrying far too many books than he could conceivably carry and who seemed to have just gotten into a row with one of the library staff.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“C’mon, time to meet the office grump,” he said with a smile and a wink. “Jon, this is Martin. Martin, this is Jon, my worse half,” he gestured to the man standing in front of them. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was short but more than made up for it with his imposing presence. That was, he </span>
  <em>
    <span>seemed</span>
  </em>
  <span> intimidating until he turned to look at Martin and looked, for a moment, like he’d been hit by a bus. He had warm brown eyes and his hair (streaked with silver though he seemed relatively young) was tucked back into a bun with a few strands falling forwards. His face was slim and it was smiling. Slowly, eyebrows pulling up and mouth tipping skyward at the edges, slightly parted, and he was looking at Martin that way and Martin had fallen, irrevocably, for yet another Jon. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hello! I’m Martin, like Tim said, heh,” he rubbed the back of his neck and laughed awkwardly but trudged on bravely and stuck a hand out for a handshake. (Real academic types shake hands, yeah?) “It’s nice to meet you!” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The man’s face fell faster than an asteroid down into the ocean and Martin watched, for what would be the first in a long line of times, as Jonathan Sims packed away each bit of vulnerability from his face until only stone remained.</span>
</p><p>
  <span> (Maybe real academics didn’t shake hands?)</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Jonathan Sims,” he replied coldly, then he turned on his heel and walked away, leaving Tim wincing and Martin speechless. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, that was…” Martin started, not even sure where to begin. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Rude? Yeah, sorry, he can get like that. But it's alright, come on, I gotta show you all the dangerous parts of the Institute, the fun cabinets where we keep the alcohol and the spooky hidden tunnels where we hide the bodies.” Tim pulled him away with a hand on his elbow and some forced banter and Martin tried to forget… just about everything about Jonathan Sims. No use obsessing over yet another person with no time for him. He knew how that ended well enough. And besides, he wasn’t in the business of breaking his own heart further. His romantic life could subsist with the memories of Jonny d’Ville until he had the time and the freedom and the life to find a person to love fully. That Jonathan Sims would only spell trouble, and Martin knew it. Besides, they’d barely said a handful of words to each other, Martin was just projecting all his first day jitters onto the first pretty face to treat him brusquely.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But Martin couldn’t forget that moment of quiet awe on Sims’ face when Martin had smiled at him, like he was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, like Martin himself held the whole wide world in his broad hands. It was almost familiar, and achingly so. He couldn’t quite get the image of Jon’s wide eyes out of his head, sparkling with something like recompense, and he couldn’t forget the way looking at Jonathan Sims back had made him feel: like he’d swallowed too many stars. Like he was the whole damn constellation. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Well. Loving always had been his hardest habit to break. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Six years of my adolescent life spent in a creative writing program and this is what I have to show for it?<br/>Anyway this one goes out to Cleo &amp; Maya if y'all are reading this know this is your fault xoxo ;)</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>